Moby-Dick was a novel by American author Herman Melville. The story describes CaptainAhab's obsessive quest to hunt down the eponymous white sperm whale that had maimed him years earlier. In the end, Ahab's thirst for vengeance destroyed both him and his ship.

The original, from the novel's thirty-sixth chapter, is "I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up!" Some thematic elements from the movie were borrowed from the plot of Moby-Dick, including Khan's relentless pursuit of Kirk which ultimately results in his own death and the loss of his ship.

Its cultural significance was such that the story was well-known to most people on Earth regardless of their literary knowledge. In 2063, Lily Sloane compared Jean-Luc Picard's hatred for the Borg to Ahab's desire to destroy the white whale when he insisted on fighting them rather than destroying the Enterprise and the Borg along with it, sending Picard into such a rage that he destroyed the display of Enterprise's past in the ship's observation lounge - but when the captain, realizing she was absolutely right, paraphrased a verse from the forty-first chapter, ("And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.") Sloane, clearly unfamiliar with the words, admitted she had never actually read the book. (Star Trek: First Contact)

The original is "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

In addition to First Contact, the original series episodes "The Doomsday Machine" and "Obsession" were also loosely based on the story of Moby-Dick.

Moby-Dick was at one point to have featured in DS9: "Extreme Measures", as evidenced by an early revision of the episode's final draft script (submitted when the installment was titled "Night Tremors"). In that script, Miles O'Brien referred to the story as a "tough book" and explained that he believed this because "I remember him spending pages and pages talking about the different kinds of harpoons," though Julian Bashir replied, "I actually like the level of detail." In the final version of the episode, Moby-Dick was replaced with A Tale of Two Cities.}}